Tag Archives: Shunji Egusa

Noisy new world with clothing that sings and records and varnishes that ring alarms

They’re called functional fibres and a team at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has taken another step forward in achieving fibres that can produce and detect sound. From the news item on physorg.com,

For centuries, “man-made fibers” meant the raw stuff of clothes and ropes; in the information age, it’s come to mean the filaments of glass that carry data in communications networks. But to Yoel Fink, an Associate professor of Materials Science and principal investigator at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are much too passive. For the past decade, his lab has been working to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment.

… Applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain. The paper, whose authors also include Shunji Egusa, a former postdoc in Fink’s lab, and current lab members Noémie Chocat and Zheng Wang, appeared on Nature Materials‘ website on July 11, and the work it describes was supported by MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. [emphases mine]

Interesting to note all of the military interest.

The heart of the new acoustic fibers is a plastic commonly used in microphones. By playing with the plastic’s fluorine content, the researchers were able to ensure that its molecules remain lopsided — with fluorine atoms lined up on one side and hydrogen atoms on the other — even during heating and drawing. The asymmetry of the molecules is what makes the plastic “piezoelectric,” meaning that it changes shape when an electric field is applied to it.

I’m not sure how this fits with Professor Zhong Lin Wang’s work in the field of piezotronics  (July 12, 2010 posting) and I’m not looking at the technical aspect so much as the social impact of clothing made of fibres that can harvest biomechanical energy and/or record sound and/or produce sound. In other words, what’s the social impact? In all the talk about developing new products and getting them to market,  I haven’t found that much discussion about whether people are going to adopt products that are constantly monitoring their health or given to making a sound for one reason or another. When you add in the other work on such things as varnishes that emit sounds as they cool or heat (Feb. 3, 2010, 2nd excerpt, last paragraph), you have to come to the conclusion that at the very least it’s going to be a very noisy world in the future. Questions that come to mind include: will these fibres that can monitor our health or record sounds or the varnishes that sound alarms have an off button? What happens if they malfunction?